Twenty-Five Year Apprenticeship

What is one thing you wish you had known as a first-tour officer?

I didn’t realize how great of a risk it was to be passive and allow things to happen to me if I did not take the lead. It’s not personal, but the system was not created to help people succeed, it was created to help the country succeed, which means people need to figure out how to make it work for them. Luck plays a role, but you can’t just rely on that, you have to take initiative.

I also realized the importance of having a mix of people coming in. I came in two years after college and didn’t have much life or work experience. In fact, I failed the “inbox exercise” portion of the orals, as I had no idea what to do with action items or taskings. A lot of people, though, did have that experience and were more self-confident as a result. This is a situation where informal mentorships were invaluable, that’s how I learned things.

What was the mistake you learned the most from?

Although I usually encourage people to be risk-takers, my biggest mistake was not being sufficiently careful. At my first post in the 1980s, I was working on human rights in Honduras and I sent a memo to my boss expressing concern about the lack of diversity of opinion being included in public diplomacy discussions of U.S. policy in Central America. This memo was then shared with the Public Affairs Counselor and resulted in me getting blacklisted from future events and discussions. Looking back, I still believe that I had the right opinion, but it’s not just about the right opinion, you have to know how to pursue it. I should have been strategic about it and talked to my boss first.

One of the things that is not being adequately taught in the Foreign Service is media relations and how to talk to reporters; I got in trouble with that during my early career, too. The message seems to be that the best thing you can do is have no contact with the media—but that’s contrary to our goals. No one is being taught how to engage the media, with ground rules, etc. When I was at the Clinton National Security Council, it was considered mandatory to talk to reporters.

Can you describe a day where you felt like you truly made a difference? What came together to create that day?

This is an important question. There are always days when you feel like you didn’t make a difference, or you’re useless, or worse; those are balanced by the days when you did make a difference. My participation in our dissent on Balkans policy in the early 1990s comes to mind; if everyone who works on an issue in-depth thinks we are going the wrong way, there should be a way to make that voice heard.

In Honduras, where I had this rather difficult first tour and had to draft the first accurate Human Rights Report that had been published since the crisis began, where we talked about the disappearances… that felt good, if only because those reports had been politicized and censored in the past, and we finally got out the word that the government was “disappearing” people. This was when Senator Leahy was first developing the idea that we should not be giving aid to those who participate in human rights violations. I also worked on establishing relationships with former Soviet states following the end of the Cold War.

I feel lucky enough to feel like I have made a difference on a number of occasions, which is important to balance out the inevitable other times. And you really can affect change—even if you’re a consular officer on your first tour, you can make a difference by, for example, taking steps to improve the way we interview or adjudicate.

Who was your best boss and why?

I’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of great bosses. One important thing they had in common was the way they relate to and take care of their people. Some bosses, we would sit there and ask “do you think he actually knows our names?” What is often missing is a commitment to people as people. A good boss is someone who cares and sits down and works to help their employees improve.

Another attribute of good bosses is “the vision thing.” Thinking in broad terms because it inspires and motivates people to think their work matters. It’s hard to feel very good about what you’re doing with a cynical boss.

Finally, a good boss teaches you the tactics, how to work the bureaucracy. You learn certain things by watching and listening to people who do it well and then modeling it. When I was Ambassador in Bulgaria, people would ask how I learned to do certain things, and I said: “by watching and learning.”

A GAO report showed that the percentage of black women Foreign Service Officers went from 2% in 2002 to only 3% in 2017. How can we address disparities that go back decades so that we can achieve a workforce that looks like America?

AFSA did a survey over the summer asking FSOs if they were considering leaving the service and why. If you accounted for specific groups like African Americans, perceived bias in the assignments and promotion processes was the second most cited reason. We need transparency and evidence-based decision-making. For example, we could utilize an algorithm that considers preferences and allows for pairings that are data-driven rather than based on personal networks. Such mechanisms would bring more transparency to opaque processes that otherwise breed cynicism. If people view the system as rigged, and have a feeling they lack control, that is a major driver of unhappiness and anxiety. The system can feel random, and everyone thinks everyone else has mastered it and they haven’t. People are more likely to respond to a fair and equitable system.

What values do you think we need to reinforce or change in our workforce?

We’re missing a vision, we are somewhat adrift as a country after the end of the Cold War. I believe in the work we do as a part of the country’s work in the world, but we need to decide how we lead. There is a lot we still haven’t made decisions on. We need a Mission Statement we can all get behind, not the “Burger King Customer Service” pledge. We have a special role in the world that no one else can play and we need to revive, restore and modernize the Foreign Service to live up to this role. This means having active conversations with different groups who care, including the Hill, to get the resources to make a true impact.

What would you change about the State Department?

Several things we have on the AFSA agenda are getting more people and more resources. We need to address deficits in initial training and education. Learning things such as the art of negotiations takes more than a day. We need to make training several months, not several weeks, and far more comprehensive, but you can only do that if you have enough people.